There’s a good chance the Tennessee legislature will pass the state budget today — the main hurdle being whether they can get the spending bills to the floors of the House and Senate before the day’s out.

The Senate Finance Committee has already approved the budget, and it is under debate right now in the House Finance Committee.

The main sticking point appears to be the state’s better-than-projected tax receipts. Tennessee has already brought in $107 million more than expected and Democrats believe Gov. Bill Haslam’s budget understates revenue by as much as $400 million. They have pressed to use some of those funds to further reduce the sales tax on food and to restore budget cuts implemented during the recession.

Republicans have argued for banking most of the money, saying the upcoming health care reforms make it more prudent to save than spend. Finance Commissioner Mark Emkes stated the case today in House Finance:

“You can say 200 (million dollars); you can say 400. But in 2014 that money goes away. So don’t spend money that we don’t have,” he said. “Let’s not spend all that money today.”

Democrats bristle a bit at that argument, and not only because it points the figure at the Democrats in Washington who passed the health care reform law two years ago. They point out that that final budget plan include several projects favor by Republicans.

In House Finance, Democrats attempted force an item-by-item vote on a portion of the budget that apparently covered special projects. The move failed, but the issue is likely to resurface on the floor when the budget is finally brought up.

Update: Democrats appear to be gaining some traction on the issue of local spending projects in House Finance.

After the attempt to force separate votes failed, Democrats filed a series of amendments that would have taken those projects out of the bill one-by-one. As House Speaker Emeritus Jimmy Naifeh described the projects, Republicans began to express some discomfort with them — in part because all of them had been added by their counterparts in the Senate.

The showdown came to a head when Naifeh filed an amendment to remove a $200,000 grant to the West Tennessee city of Somerville — “seed money” to explore the possibility of building a high education facility — from the budget. Republican leaders attempted to table the amendment, but several rank-and-file Republicans broke ranks. The tabling motion was defeated 13-11.

House Majority Leader Gerald McCormick smirked as the vote went against him and quipped to reporters that a story appeared to be in the making. He immediately called for a 15-minute recess to try to get his troops back in line.

Update #2: That 15-minute recess exceeded two hours, and now that they’re back, the House Finance Committee seems to have agreed to take out most of those local projects out of the budget, including the seed money for Somerville.

“What we’ve done is we tried to make a statement,” House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh said.

This sets the House on a collision course with the Senate, which put the projects in.

The changes were approved and the budget was sent to the Calendar & Rules Committee for scheduling.